


The Offer

by bunnyfication



Series: Lost and Found [3]
Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 22:28:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13645725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnyfication/pseuds/bunnyfication
Summary: Kanzeon Bosatsu makes a visit, Sanzo is unimpressed.





	The Offer

**Author's Note:**

> Could this be the fluff I've been promising/threatening with? Or is it even, I can't tell?

It was spring, and the fruit garden was in bloom, fragrant blossoms covering the trees. The sky above was eggshell blue, dotted with high, wispy clouds at the edges, clouds that did nothing to hinder the sun. Its heat was still mild this high up on the mountain, especially with the light breeze blowing in, just enough to shake an occasional shower of petals from the few cherry trees still in bloom around the pavilion with its view into the open air.

It was, in short, disgustingly idyllic, Sanzo thought, squinting against the riot of colour and light.

Though he still had a clear enough memory of the winter to appreciate the warmth. Like this, at least, his breath didn’t catch in the cold and he didn’t feel like a man older than abbot Seiran as his old injuries decided to all ache because it was too cold or damp or whatever.

From where he sat on the stone bench, he could hear the industrious buzz of bees collecting pollen, and over it, Huamei running back and forth across the garden and laughing while waving her rattle drum and only occasionally producing some thuds from it.

Learning to run and climb all over the place apparently, took priority over learning to talk or anything else more useful in Huamei’s world, Sanzo had concluded. He’d have blamed Goku for a bad example, but he had a feeling it was her own unique way of being a nuisance.

Besides, they’d all learned that when she got quiet was the time to be concerned, because that was when she was doing something truly bothersome. Or she was asleep. Sometimes in odd places where no one could find her.

Surely he was never this much trouble as a child, no matter what Koumyou had said in a rare moment of reminiscence…

From the corner of one eye, he saw as Li turned from the teaching scroll in his hands, distracted by Huamei running by for the nth time. Sanzo tsked, which immediately had the boy hunching like a kicked dog over his reading, his eyes trained sightlessly on the text. He was still twitchy, Sanzo thought, surveying the boy from the corner of one eye, though at least he hadn’t shown any further homicidal tendencies.

Huamei ran over and babbled at Li, who looked back at her as quizzically as he always did when this happened. She reached out the hand holding out the rattle expectantly.

“She wants you to play,” Sanzo said after Li had stared at her in incomprehension for a while.

“Huh?” he said, and: “Oh.”

Then he took the rattle and flicked it in a rapid movement that made it produce a rattling sound. Sanzo cringed as Huamei screeched in delight, clapping her dirty hands together. Li, seemingly despite himself, smiled a little at her obvious delight.

He turned away again, only half watching as Li put the scroll aside in the grass to entertain Huamei. Technically this was time they ought to have been talking, but Sanzo was damned if he knew what to say to a deeply unhappy eight-year old, so he usually had him working on his letters.

He figured if the boy ever felt like talking to him, he would.

He gave him and Huamei another glance soon after, unable to shake the unease over having them so close together. It was good for the boy to learn to see Huamei as another child rather than a monster, and her sunny, open demeanour was surely solving that problem.

He couldn’t as easily forget the memory of Li hanging her over the edge of the mountain.

He looked up at movement and saw Shun walking towards them.

“Master Sanzo, the abbot wanted to speak to you?” he informed Sanzo politely.

Ah, he’d probably gotten some correspondence, possibly from the youkai leaders he’d contacted last month.

Sanzo sighed inwardly as he got up. It was a thorny, delicate business, trying to negotiate the fragile situation between the humans and the largely underground network of surviving youkai… he sometimes wondered if he really gave advice abbot Seiran needed, or whether he was just being sneakily trained to take over after him.

Probably a bit of both.

“You have anything else to do?” he asked Shun, and the young man hesitated a moment before shaking his head.

“Nothing too important if you have a task for me, sir,” he replied, and Sanzo nodded.

“Stay here with Huamei then,” he said shortly.

He doubted he’d be with Seiran long, and she liked Shun. And he wouldn’t have left her with someone as young as Li even if he hadn’t tried to kill her half a year ago.

“Follow me, you’ll be going back to the dorms to finish your reading,” he told Li, who gathered his things quietly, his expression gone shut-off again.

He was a quiet shadow as they walked, and he almost might have been on his own, until the boy sighed, barely audibly.

“She isn’t afraid of me,” he said, after Sanzo made a questioning noise.

“She’s too young,” he replied, and they continued in silence, almost up to where their paths diverged.

There, Li stopped, his gaze trained on something unseen, visibly struggling with some thought.

“It… it would have been a terrible thing,” he said gravely, before blinking rapidly and glancing over at Sanzo. “Right?”

As if he was an expert on terrible things. He was, perhaps, and he wondered what the smile he could feel shaping his lips looked like. Eyes like a demon, was what those monks had said, years ago. And he hadn’t even had any blood on his hands then, which came to show what they’d known, those assholes.

He shrugged. What he wanted to say was that he didn’t know shit, but that wouldn’t fly here.

“It’s the first precept, isn’t it, to abstain from taking life,” he said, feeling the emptiness of the words like the taste of stale cigarette smoke in his mouth.

He clicked his tongue, longing for an actual cigarette, still feeling the boy’s expectant gaze on him.

“Never mind that. Did it feel terrible?” he tried instead, hearing the irritation in his voice.

“Yes,” Li whispered.

“Then it probably was,” he said shortly, wondering when the act of killing had stopped feeling like a weight on his soul. What that said of the state of it. If Li was lucky, he’d never have to ask that question himself.

*

He returned with a heavier step than he’d left with, the brief conversation with Li having put him in a dark mood that the discussion with Seiran hadn’t lifted.

As it was, the sunlight in the garden seemed to only grate on him all the more, and he was not pleased to find Shun fast asleep on the grass, curled up on his side.

It wasn’t like him to fall asleep on duty, he thought irritably, looking up to see where Huamei had got to.

And then his blood froze, because he could see her, almost immediately, sitting on one of the stone benches in the pavilion, her short pudgy legs hanging over the edge and not close to the ground… and next to her, a tall figure clad in flowing black, with dark and wavy hair, and for a moment he thought—but no, that bastard was dead, very dead. They’d checked.

Besides, on second look the dark cloth wasn’t cut like a Sanzo’s robes, but rather in ample, flowing drapes, out of fabric so thin it was slightly transparent, and the hair fell down in a long ponytail. Besides, there was a curve of hips and, as the figure turned, ample breasts under the too-thin fabric.

Most damningly, a feeling like a clear bell ringing in the distance, or a thousand, million shouts for relief cut off and lost in the wind. A weight, pressing down on the fabric of reality, all discernible if he concentrated on it.

And a faint, distorted memory of lips on his, soft and full. A tongue on his, sweet through the taste of blood and infuriating even through the weakness of blood loss.

As the figure stood up and turned, scooping Huamei up as ze went, he knew who it was even before he saw the smirk on those same lips.

Hakkai and Gojyo had described hir accurately, bar for the clothing, which he supposed was mercifully modest, compared to what Gojyo had so crassly described years ago.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Sanzo asked flatly.

That just made hir smirk more.

“Is that any way to greet your dearest bodhisattva, Genjo?” Kanzeon Bosatsu chided.

“What do you want?” he asked suspiciously, wanting to grasp Huamei away from the goddess, just on principle.

Ze was balancing the child on one arm while studying the nails of the other, Huamei seeming content with the seat, precarious as it looked to Sanzo.

“Well,” ze drawled. “I tried contacting you through the three aspects but turns out you’d left without a forwarding address. Rude, Genjo.”

“Like you care,” Sanzo muttered, though not very loudly. He didn’t actually want to start a fight with an unpredictable heavenly figure, as much as he suspected the bodhisattva was here for hir own amusement and no other reason.

And what was up with the style change. He didn’t get the impression fashions in heaven really changed, not that he would know. Wasn’t the place supposed to be essentially unchanging?

Kanzeon was smiling, shark like.

“So, what is it?” he asked, but the smile only widened.

“So impatient, still…” ze murmured, as he kept resisting the urge to growl.

“I’m sure you recall how you were… ah, relieved of your mission?”

“Yes?” he grated, holding onto his fraying temper with both metaphorical hands.

“Well, you could say there was since been some, ah, restructuring of bureaucracy,” Kanzeon said, still grinning at him in that eerie way.

“In heaven?” Sanzo asked disbelievingly. What did that even mean?

“Yes. Dear Nataku was a _great_ help in that,” Kanzeon said, relishing the words like a cat with a bowl of cream, before turning towards Huamei and poking her in the cheek with a long nail.

“Unlike some lazybones that keep idling down here… don’t think I don’t know you’re doing it on purpose,” ze said.

Huamei made a gurgling sound that blew a spit bubble out of her mouth. The bodhisattva clicked hir tongue with exaggerated disappointment.

“I don’t know what that means, but…” _stay away from her_ , he almost said, before remembering he wasn’t going to aggravate hir.

Kanzeon Bosatsu laughed, in hir low alto.

“There are some souls that are right on the edge of enlightenment, but you just can’t get them to discard the last ties, it’s always _no I have unfinished business with this or that_ ,” ze said with an exaggerated sigh. “As if there is a way to continue a game once you’ve played your trump card… so foolish. And right when we could use some sensible new recruits too. I would have liked to have seen this one against some of my colleagues.”

Sanzo could feel his face scrunch up with the suspicion that had never left since he saw the bodhisattva here.

“Oh?” he said, with an indifferent nod towards Huamei. “And what was her last life like then?”

Kanzeon Bosatsu snickered.

“You know I’m not supposed to tell, how naughty,” ze muttered, dark eyes glittering at him. Ugh.

“Anyway, it wasn’t anything particularly interesting, just your regular life as a farmer’s son in a little place you’d never have heard of far northeast… not a bad life, if a bit short. Poor dear, bad times, and he was only fifteen when the epidemic struck, had just started reading a distance course to become a doctor...”

Ze bounced Huamei up and down, hir smile not fitting the words at all.

“Whatever,” Sanzo said, trying not to show how disturbed he was, though ze probably knew anyway. “Do I have another mission or something?” he asked, feeling tired suddenly.

“Now, now,” Kanzeon muttered. “Maybe I just came here to congratulate you for a job well done, even if it was against direct orders. Really, if anyone had asked _me_ , I could have told them the five of you were more likely to do the exact opposite of what you were told,” ze said and winked, horrifyingly.

Also implying it hadn’t been hir decision, huh? Something weird really must have gone down in heaven then. He was just glad it wasn’t his problem.

“Well, have fun with another round, and good luck with this one,” ze purred, scritching Huamei under the chin like she was a kitten, before finally handing her over to Sanzo, so suddenly he wasn’t prepared and nearly dropped her.

He let her slide down to stand up instead, the child clinging to his legs and peering over at the merciful goddess from behind a fold of robe she’d clutched in one fist.

“Ah, that takes me back…” ze muttered, looking at the two of them. “Which reminds me, how are your companions? Especially the little monkey?” ze asked with a leer, before tapping at hir cheek. “My mistake, not so little anymore, is he, Genjo?”

Oh no.

“We’re not discussing that,” he snapped, all though of diplomacy forgotten.

Kanzeon Bosatsu just giggled, dangerously.

“Ooh, touchy!” ze exclaimed. “No worries, I don’t judge. It’s good to see you two so happy, warms an aunt’s heart.”

Ze lapsed into a silence as he glared at hir and ze seemed to relish his suffering. Ze had better not been peeping on them or he would… not be able to do a damn thing about it, damn it all to hell.

Kanzeon tapped a finger to hir lips, before seeming to recall something.

“Oh, now I remember, the three aspects were supposed to tell you were offered your old position back, in heaven.”

“What,” Sanzo said, staring at hir.

“Everyone except the… ah, he calls himself Cho Hakkai now doesn’t he? But I already asked your lovely red headed friend and he turned me down flat, if you can believe it.”

“Sanzo, I felt someth… oh,” a voice said behind him, and Sanzo closed his eyes for just a second.

“Goku,” he said drily, “apparently the heavens want us to move up there, what do you say?”

Goku stepped to his side, and when he glanced over he found he was given a quizzical look.

“Huh,” Goku said, and then, “Is Nataku ok?”

Sanzo froze. He’d forgotten those two were friends, and Goku actually remembered… he hadn’t really wanted to think about it, and had told Goku not to tell him anything, but he almost regretted it now.

What if he wanted to go?

“Hakkai wasn’t invited and Gojyo turned them down,” he said quickly, feeling like he was cheating and not caring.

“Of course…” Goku muttered, in a distracted tone. “But really, what happened to him?” he repeated.

“You could come see yourself,” the bodhisattva said with a little smile, holding out a hand towards Goku, and Sanzo _hated_ hir.

“Um,” Goku said, and Sanzo could feel his eyes on him again.

Kanzeon Bosatsu laughed once more.

“You really are too cute,” ze said. “Your friend is fine, Goku. A bit busy, so no promises, but I might send him on a little holiday whenever things calm down a bit. And talking about which, your replies? Consider well, you never know if you’ll be offered this again.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Sanzo grated, and could feel Goku move closer to his side.

“Me neither, I have things to do here,” he said, in a milder tone. “Um, but could you say to Nataku I hope he… that he finds it. And that he’s my family too.”

As Sanzo glanced over, he was slightly flushed. Huh. Maybe he should do some careful questioning after all. He still didn’t want to know too much, the dead were dead, previous lives or no. But this Nataku person evidently wasn’t.

“I’ll tell him that, I’m sure he’ll appreciate it,” Kanzeon said, hir smile more genuine than Sanzo would have thought possible, based on previous interaction, brief as it was. “You kiddos take care of each other,” ze drawled.

There was a sudden gust of wind, throwing petals out of the nearest trees in a blinding shower of white. By the time they cleared, a second later, ze was gone as if ze’d never been there.

“Damn dramatic…” Sanzo cursed, before sighing in relief. “I need a cigarette,” he decided, before pushing Huamei towards Goku. She went, though she gave him a pouty look even as Goku picked her up effortlessly.

Show-off.

He sat down on the bench, digging out his cigarettes. Sure, he’d mostly quit them, but if this didn’t earn him one then fuck that.

Goku was hovering nearby, before he sat down on the grass, and he could hear him talk to Huamei in a low voice, and her babbling responses with no real words in them.

As her noises turned into low, disgruntled whines, he turned their way and saw she was struggling in Goku’s hold, holding her arms out his way, not close to tears by any measure, simply… expressing a wish the only way she knew how.

The cigarette was almost finished, so he extinguished it against the bench and sighed.

“Ok, let her go.”

Goku grinned and released Huamei, who immediately ran over and just sank her face right into his knees, her pudgy arms thrown around his legs under the robe. Children were strange, or possibly just this one.

“Saaaan!” she said, and Sanzo blinked down at her, even as Huamei raised her head and beamed up at him. “Sansan!” she repeated, revealing sharp baby teeth as she did. Then she rubbed her face on his robes again, until her fringe stood up like the fluff on an old dandelion.

“Huh.” Goku said, and when Sanzo looked over his eyes were wide. “Did she just say your name?”

“Badly,” he replied, but he could feel a smile on his lips too.

Huamei was rocking back and forth now, tugging on his robes, so he picked her up before she tore them. She immediately tried to climb over his shoulder, and he grumbled and pulled her back, giving her a light shake that only made her giggle delightedly, fool that she was.

Goku climbed over the bench to sit next to him and leaned closer to Huamei.

“Ok Huamei, can you say my name? Go… ku… Gooo-ku!”

She giggled and babbled nonsense at him, but he wasn’t discouraged.

“Ok, how about shit-ty wa-ter-spri-te?”

Sanzo rolled his eyes.

They were all fools. Utter fools.

(Himself included.)


End file.
